It was a difficult presentation to put together because it combines such a broad range of areas, from technology, culture and mindsets, and all the way to political ideology. This is accentuated by the fact I straddle both the role of citizen and civil servant. It is my hope, however that this duality help us understand both perspectives.

For the purposes of this presentation, there is a need to define the word “citizen”, a term which will come up often in any discussion of government and even more so in government 2.0. For the purpose of this presentation I’m going to define citizen as “anyone who has thrown their lot in with us”. I think it is as absurd, in this day and age of globalisation that we should continue to define people by where they were born, as it is to judge a person by the colour of their skin. Instead, citizens should be seen as the people who have decided to share a collective fate and a common destiny. People who look at Singapore simply as a stepping stone or springboard need not apply.

In order to understand what Gov 2.0 is, we must first define what Gov 1.0 was, in order to effectively move away from the old model.

Hey folks, it’s been a while, but we’re meeting up next week:

Date: Wednesday, 30th September 2009
Time: 7:30pm (we’ve booked the room from 7pm)
Place: Seminar Room 4.2 @ School of Economics & Social Sciences, SMU (it’s the building nearer the National Museum)

Speakers and Topics

Introduction to HTML5

There’s a lot that’s been said about HTML5, yet oddly enough everyone’s been so busy not many folks have actually kept up with what this new iteration of HTML means to those of us who are developers, or the potential it opens up to owners and managers of websites.

Singapore’s own user-interface wunderkind Sunny Wong (@draco) is one of the few blokes I know who’s actually used HTML5, and will be giving us the 101 on the topic.

Gleanings from the Gov2.0 Summit

Having just returned from Tim O’Reilly’s Gov2.0 Summit in Washington D.C., I’m hoping to give a summary of the event - learning points, case studies and possible applications for us here in Singapore.

Registration

We’ll need to know how many are coming so we can get a bigger room if necessary. Drop a comment if you’re coming!

Our next meetup:

Date: Wednesday, 1st July 2009
Time: 7:30pm (can come earlier to chit-chat, we’ve booked the room from 7pm)
Place: Seminar Room 4.2 @ School of Economics & Social Sciences, SMU (it’s the building nearer the National Museum)

Speakers and Topics

This meetup we’ll delve into processes: how we make things work.

Website Design and Development Processes

Singapore web standards pioneer Nick Pan (@nickpan) will be kicking off the session with a presentation on common methodologies used to bring concept through development and unto the launch of a website. Nick bring with him a huge amount of experience, and has traversed the journey to and from code monkey, entrepreneur and project manager.

This presentation will be an open one, so feel free to conjure up your own deck of slides and take the stage if you think your approach to web development is something you’d like to share with the rest of us.

Deconstructing MOE.gov.sg

Thanks to a request over Twitter, yours truly will try to give an insight on the learning experience of revamping the Ministry of Education’s website. It’ll be a glimpse of working within large organisations, and hopefully you’ll walk away with a few tips on how to deal with Galactica-sized setups.

See you guys there?

We’ll need to know how many are coming so we can get a bigger room if necessary. So drop a comment if you’ll come yah?

Date: 29th April 2009
Time: 8pm (can come earlier to chit-chat, we’ve booked the room from 7pm)
Place: Seminar Room 4.2 @ School of Economics & Social Sciences, SMU

Speakers and Topics

Where Websites Go Wrong

Andy Croll (@andycroll) will be speaking on “Where Websites Go Wrong”, covering commonplace mistakes made by websites. Andy blogs at Deepcalm and has done spectacular work on Singaporean websites such as Epicurious and Bezurk (now known as Wego).

Developing for the Mobile Platform

Jon Peterson (@singeo) will be covering the in and outs of developing applications for the mobile platform. Jon has wowed many of us with his mad topographical skills on his blog Singeo, moved his mapping mojo to mobiles with iSingeo and most recently whetted our insatiable need for good food with the iPhone application buUuk.

What the Singapore Gahmen Could Do Better Online

We will also be having an open discussion on “What the Singapore Government could do better online”. While we encourage a spirited debate, there is a need to keep from becoming a slamming session (unless by slamming, you mean kickass, and by kickass, you mean awesome). So political tirades aside, let’s get cracking on how Singapore could move forward on making things happen.

Epic Fail

We’ve heard of your single claim to fame. Now regale us with tales of the many failures, missed opportunities and faceplants. We want to hear every sordid detail of how you took the wrong turn and ended up sitting next to the rest of us at the meetup instead of wining and dining with Silicon Valley’s finest. If you have such a story, bring it. Open mic, five minutes a piece, slides optional.

Because we’re sick of listening to the lucky few. This is the time for failure to shine.

Are you coming?

Due to the limited number of seats, I’d ask that you leave a comment below if you are coming. We’ll move to a larger room if necessary and available.

See you guys there.

Will people pay for a printed version of what could be made available online?

The answer of course, is yes. People still buy newspapers, although the numbers are dropping. Moleskines are the rage. It will be some time before we see the end of paper.

JPG Magazine was printed on high-end glossy paper. Its closure means that people, for the most part, are satisfied with online images, even though they provide no tactile satisfaction and are often constrained to small resolutions. The improvement in quality of the printed photo over the Flickr image isn’t worth paying for, making the business of JPG Magazine an unsustainable one.

So what would make you pay for something in print? These are a 2 of my own reasons, feel free to add your own. That I couldn’t think of any more makes me pessimistic about the print industry as a whole.

• A substantial amount of information that has to be packaged as a whole (e.g. a book)
• It is important for the info to be electricity-independent (e.g. first-aid manual)

Date: Thursday, 18th December 2008
Time: 7pm
Place: Sketches, Bugis Junction

Please leave a comment if you’ll be attending.

When asked what it was about Singapore that inspired their creativity, Chris cited Singapore’s proximity to her neighbouring countries. Tad answered that he found inspiration in Singapore, mainly because it wasn’t San Francisco; that the difference in environment was a catalyst in itself. Jackson brought out an extremely interesting point that Singapore, being such a young nation, was a “blank canvas”.

It was apt to see a creative person find opportunity where many others couldn’t. Where most people viewed Singapore’s absence of a mature culture as a lack in inspiration, Jackson saw it as freedom for expression. He elaborated further that Singapore artists are able to design for the future unencumbered by their past.

While a blank canvas provides artistic freedom, Chris emphasised a need for Singaporeans to be confident in who they were as a person in order to solidify the idea of Singaporean design. Singaporeans are always trying to do things correctly, comparing themselves to standards set by other people, and this prohibited the development of a national identity. Jackson agreed and added that somewhere in our collective history, the Singapore brand became international before she could be national.

While Singapore’s diverse populace provided a rich source of inspiration, Tad commented that having too much input made it hard to solidify a culture, and that the attribute of one’s race was too explicit in Singapore. Graham raised the example of how our race was printed on our identity cards.

It is time perhaps, for Singapore to think about not holding on so tight to the cultures of our forebears and forge a way for ourselves. It may not win design awards; people may take a while to understand the English we speak; but we’d be creating an identity we own.

Like it or not, there’s a natural divide between PR agencies, marketing folks, advertising executives and everyday folk. We know that the marketing guys are after our wallets, not our welfare. Advertisements are often crafted to sell something we don’t need, or make something crappy appear like angel’s wings. So when attending conferences organised by corporations, rather than guys on the ground, I often enter with my antennae fully raised. It sometimes feels like I’m privy to new innovative tricks these slick advertising people have come up with to fool us all.

Not so with this conference. It felt authentic. At the end of the conference, we went up to Piers Fawkes, founder and CEO of PSFK. We wanted to thank him for letting the bunch of us bloggers get in for free.

You’d have expected savvy ad guys to at least work the gratitude angle, maybe ask us to write good things of the conference on the blog. Not Piers.

“Write what you liked about the conference. Or write about what you don’t. Send me the link!”

It’s not rocket science or anything, but the realisation that you have control over your product and not what people say about it separates the ones who understand the media environment we live in and the ones who are still hitting their head on a world gone by.

I’ll be posting up more stuff gleaned from the individual sessions. It’s liberating to know that Piers won’t mind sharing the knowledge from the conference. He’ll be putting up video clips from the conference on the PSFK website once they’re done editing it.

That’s more generous than pretty much any conference I’ve ever been to.

Everyone complains about MySpace’s user controlled”ugly” layouts, yet when we get a refined UI, many complain about FB’s changes

The point I wanted to make was that most negative feedback after a redesign comes from people who have gotten used to the older design. This is not to say that we should never redesign anything, but that we should pay a little less attention to people who just “liked it the way it was” and are unable to tell you why the new design isn’t working for them. Change is never easy for anybody; and change is what we designers do.

We are called to innovate, but keep things intuitive. While this seems somewhat of a contradiction, it is holds the secret to good design: Discipline.

I’m not a frequent visitor to MySpace because I cannot bear to look at the typical myspace webpage. While they showcase novel things that can be done on a webpage, they lacks the restraint of good design. All sorts of different media (audio, video, interactive polls) are thrown together mindlessly. It creates a mind-numbing drone in my skull just to think about it.

Discipline in design is a result of a lot of serious study. When Apple launched the iPod Touch and then later the iPhone, the interface was extremely innovative to mp3 players and mobile phones, but the interactive metaphors were tried and tested. The touch screen mimicked physical interaction - what you would experience if you pushed a piece of paper around with your finger. The zooming in and out interaction was similar to how you’d stretch and contract an elastic sheet of rubber. It is an amazing piece of work.

I’ve been keeping notes on how my daughter Anne interacts with our iMac at home. She finds it odd to move a third-party device (the mouse) rather than touching the screen directly. It requires user education (a compromise) to teach her that she has to double click on an icon to open it. She would rather speak its name loudly.

What is intuitive is different from what is learned. The time it has taken technology to evolve has taken us away from intuitive interfaces. It is only in recent times that technology is catching up, enabling us to control virtual objections with rules we inherently learn from the natural world.

Personally, I think the paper does a decent job of making pragmatic and forward-looking recommendations to the government. But here at WebSG, we’re inclined to look at the practice, rather than the talk of using technology.

Granted that the website wasn’t created by the AIMS team itself, the lack of technological know-how is a little jarring when you consider that AIMS is helping chart the Singapore Government’s foray into the online space.

The AIMS website fails on a number of fronts. It is visually cluttered without a consistent means of navigation. Both visually and technically, the website looks like a teenager’s room. Information is haphazardly plonked on any available space. There is a great burden placed on the reader to make sense of it all.

I had no idea that the tag cloud was a means of voting. There is absolutely no indication whatsoever, nor am I told what the votes translate to. I would have liked to comment on the use of flash for the tag cloud and how it creates inaccessibility, but the site itself isn’t particularly usable on any level.

I haven’t been able to create an account on their forums using Firefox. AIMS needs to be aware that these technical barriers can be easily misconstrued as a closed door for feedback and participation.

Sample code from the website.

For instance, if you visited the Singapore page and clicked on the ‘SIN - Singapore’ link, the same page would open in a new window. It can be a little vexing seeing your screen filled with popup windows that have opened along the way. It is as if the designer is worried that the visitor will leave the site, so he creates more popup windows to reduce that chance. On the contrary - I felt like quitting the moment I found the information I wanted!

An accessibility test was run on the website, and the verdict is that improvements can be made. Pop-up windows, inconsistent page design and information architecture and changes in language prevented disabled users from accessing the website fully.

Admittedly, it is a challenge designing a website for an international audience, let alone making it accessible. However, more awareness can be raised among China’s web designers (and the people hiring them) about designing with web standards and accessibility.

While it’s probably too early to brand the Semantic Web as “Web 3.0”, it was heartening to read about how things are starting to take shape. Now I know that Reuters may have a killer app called Calais that converts meaningless data into something more semantic. Other companies are following suit.

These semantic tools may just bring ‘sexy’ back to the web.